So I just put down here what I’m doing at the moment. Lately I started to automate some things like writing progress reports for customers. Now please don’t stop reading at the word “progress report”. It might become a bit more interesting than you would expect. Part of my progress report consists of all kinds of metrics about a project: budgets, quality, schedule, etc. These metrics are collected from several systems and JIRA is one of them. Until recently I copied and pasted all this data into OpenOffice, did some magical calculations with a spreadsheet, and finally generated a few graphs which I used in the progress reports. So far the boring part.

However, JIRA also has a very nice RPC plugin which can be used to invoke JIRA operations remotely. And that’s exactly what I’m playing with at the moment. I’m using jira4r as a Ruby client library to automate all my tedious copy and paste actions. First experiments are succesful: with just a couple of lines (3 lines of code to be exact) of Ruby code I’m able to get a listing of all projects registered in a certain JIRA instance. Next step is to find a good library to generate graphs. Oh, and some actual code: